THE GO-GO YEARS

by John Brooks ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 15, 1973

Up tick, up tick, up tick, tick, down tick, tick, up tick, up tick, tick +$%$&*%+ hic. Ye olde Wall Street -- America's exploding financial scoreboard, ""that summary of so much that is worst about our national tradition"" -- performed pretty well during most of the '60's, the go-go decade of conspicuous conglomerates, mighty mutuals, glorious gunslingers, hefty hedges, gaudy growths, and names (my God, Merrill Lynch, the names!) like Gerald Tsai, Ling-Temco-Vought, William Renchard, Leasco, Bernie Cornfeld. Everyone was bullish -- unAmerican not to be. Until the averages blew and H. Ross Perot lost $450 million in one day and the market, for all its ""gutter shrewdness,"" lost its fiscal pep; indeed, by the end of the '60's, ""As never before, not in the fabled panics of 1873 or 1907 or even 1929, the American securities industry was in a state of total disarray."" John Brooks -- you'll remember his novel The Man Who Broke Things and classic expose of boneheadism The Fate of the Edsel -- has just the right amount of hiss in his pen to tell this story in a manner which will appeal to the general reading public; for instance, Brooks' observation that ""Conglomerates, like prostitutes, had from the first a sufficiently shaky moral reputation to call for the use of euphemism"" says more in one sentence than you're likely to get from most writers in twenty. True, Brooks' themes are hardly original -- ""Adam Smith"" has already told us what's wrong with the Street in it he clearest possible language, and Charles Ellis' The Second Crash (KR, p. 423) probes some of the same black-and-blue chips -- but for style, anecdotes, and personalities he's hard to beat. And the serious contention that Wall Street as we have known it will soon be as dead as funny money, that the market is shedding (albeit slowly) its private-club ways and moving in ""a democratic direction,"" is worth pondering in these times of low-low purchasing power.

Pub Date: Oct. 15, 1973

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: Weybright & Talley -- dist. by McKay

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1973

Categories: NONFICTION